Yeah but you already play your friend regularly, possibly daily, you know their game and they know yours, you know their characters and they know yours. You’ve probably been practicing more than usual since you are planning to travel long distance to go to a tournament.
You travel 5 hours to a tournament and when you get there theres dozens of people that you’ve never played before using characters you don’t get to play often in your area, its a real chance to test what all of that practice you and you friend did
lead to in crunch time with something on the line. And instead of playing one of dozens of people you’ve never played before, you end up playing the same person you’ve been playing every day leading up to this thing in the first round, You could have stayed home to do that and not spent 5 hours of gas.
Its something that takes 5 seconds to rectify and doesn’t affect the legitimacy of the tournament and its a slightly dickish thing not to do when you know thats the reason these people travelled so far.
Okay, I just read through most of this thread and wanted to leave a few comments. The amount of misinformation and ignorance in this thread is somewhat mind boggling. I, for one, try to read up on a topic before debating it, but many of you seem happy to just dive in head first and throw assumptions around. The most dangerous assumption being made in this thread, and by a lot of you, is that anything below Top 2 in a double elim bracket is accurate.
No matter how you seed, or dont seed,** Double Elim can only be counted on to show you who the two best players are that day.** If you seed by skill, the odds of having a more accurate top 3, 4, 6, or 8 improve greatly, and the larger the tournament, the more accurate or meaningful getting top 8 can be. This is why pots are usually split 70/20/10. Do you think that if we did a full random bracket that Justin still would not be taking 70% of the money?
There are reasons to do it both ways, but as Henaki said early in the thread, you should usually use the size of the event and availability of past results to determine how, if at all, you seed. In the end, only the tournament director has a say on how he wishes to do this. If you disagree, you should run your own event. If you are the type of director that wants the best possible top 8, you should seed by past results. If you are the type who wants full random because you think thats more fair, do it. Neither way is shady unles you are trying to hide something. A lot of this falls onto the definition of the word fair. I wrote an article about how mis-used the word is, but the main point was this:
“Fair” means we are all playing by the same rules. No matter which way you seed the brackets, everyone is subject to the rules. Even the top players who had to get out there and earn those seeds. If you are not seeded, its because you have not been winning locals, regionals, majors, or anything. Hell, you might be bitching about this and not even entering tournaments.
I want to comment on a few posts before I’m done, but please be real. We are all entering a tournament trying to win. If you want to win, you will have to beat the top players at the event. If you meet them early and get last place, or if you meet them late and get 5th place, you still have the same skill level. Your placement does not determine your skill level. Double elim is highly random by nature of how it works, so stop worrying about how the people in 3rd to 8th place stack up. Its pointless and only proves you havent read up on the pros and cons of double elim as a system. And don’t suggest changing systems either, because every system thats better than Double elim takes ages longer, and we simply dont have the time.
Regional seeding is a big deal dude. Like it or not, no one wants to play their weekly competition at a regional or major first round. This isnt ‘rigging’ anything. Its not ‘shady’. Its being courteous to the people who spent their hard earned dollars and personal time traveling to your event. Why dont you run a few regionals without seeding by location and see how long people continue showing up from out of town. You need to step down and stop accusing people of being shady. No one is trying to hide anything, and skill/location seeding is probably older than you are (its been around for a loooooooong time)
You realize you just asked for the opposite of what it is you go on to say you want? Full random is has a chance to match you up against the guy across the road round 1. Location seeding ensures you are not on the same side of the bracket as him as best as possible.
This is just wrong on so many levels I dont even know where to begin. Seeding has nothing to do with playing favorites or being insular. Its based on past results. When a new game comes out, no one gets seeded. The next time a regional or major happens that includes the top couple players from the last big tournament, they usually get seeded. Its not playing a bias, its purely based on results. No matter how I seed or dont seed a bracket, you still need the skills to get to top2 where it matters. You still have to beat the same number of players. Dont be upset because you got 87th place but with some luck could have gotten 8th. Be mad you were not good enough to win. Thats the real issue on the player level, that and not understanding how flawed a system double elim is past top 2.
Evo seeds do not skip pool play this year. They are simply seeded into separate pools. So if Justin and Sanford win seeds in MvC2, they have zero chance of meeting in the same pool before semi finals. Again, please stop ranting and running your mouths before you know whats going on.
Exactly. Everyone has even chance to win on the theoretical level without seeding, but with seeding, the odds to win are actually a lot more even and the rankings are somewhat more accurate past top 2. To close, its all on the tournament director. What does he want? There is no ‘shady’ involved in this unles the director is seeding himself or friends who have no past tournament placings. Past results are how you skill seed, not based on who ‘looks’ good, so get that out of your heads.
At MWC this year, Super SF4 will be full random with location seeding, because its brand new. We are going full random with location on MvC2 as well due to the platform change. Should be interesting to see what top 8s look like, huh?
they just get seeded into different pools? well thats even dumber because top players can no longer take each other out EARLY. They’re just delaying their matchup and they can expect to place better because of it. I believe sanford went 0-2 or 1-2 one year @ EVO because of a random baracket and had to go up against 2 monsters iirc. jwong had to play chunk\sanford @ sb3 and lost pretty early, when was the last time wong got 17th @ a major for mvc2? you could probably go back like 5 years and not find justin EVER placing that low. This shit happens all the time depending on how many top players enter a tournament.
everyone gets dealt a bad bracket from time to time. If you’re a beast, you’ll make it regardless. Why can’t we all be @ the end of a random bracket for majors? sometimes pool play @ majors is just fucking nuts. I remember one year for mvc2, there were like 4 top 8 players in 1 bracket for pool play. Thats what I want to see. Top players @ each others fucking throats in the first round. Tooth and nail to the top.
i’m not saying do this for EVERY tournament, just the majors or when the pot exceeds a few hundred. I completely agree when its like a 20-30 man regional tourney. Seed by area and let opposing area’s go head to head. Letting people from the same area play in the first round @ a regional is stupid.
These are seeds they have to earn at known qualifiers. It was just an example. Again, no one has a say in this unless they are directing the event. I highly encourage anyone who has strong beliefs on either side of this argument to get out there and host some tournaments.
Thanks Keits, I was hoping you would come in here and share your thoughts on this issue.
I’m honestly a bit shocked to see how many people regard what I’ve been calling bracket optimization (meaning, any seeding or bracket placement strategy outside of pure random) as “shady” or somehow “unfair”.
I’ll have to agree with this as well, if you are entering a tourney aiming to do well, you should expect to play the better players anyway, so who cares when you do it, isn’t a player complaining about getting matched against a known good player earlier on bascially saying that he never stood a chance anyway?
(Not a tourney player yet, but I’ve been planning and saving travel funds to rectify that for this SVB)
Its not an argument of perfect seeding vs random brackets. That’s a fairly easy decision. you guys are discounting the fact that the TO is a human, and therefore incapable of understanding the true skill level of all players. Nor are they able to ignore status gained by ways other than winning at Street Fighter. its not that they are shady or have an evil agenda. they’re just human.
Except for unknown players who noone has seen before you really CAN judge the level of skill fairly accurately do to the nature of this community. “Everyone has an equal chance to win” is an online thing when you know the two players, and you’ve seen each of them play multiple times in the past, you know they’re characters and you know their past track records in tournaments its fairly easy to tell who is going to win the majority of tournament matches before the match starts. Not all of the time but most of the time.
(if you gave me a 32 man bracket of Northeast players i was familiar with i could probably call the winner of each match while watching the tournament without getting 5 wrong. Its not something special either most people who see the same people all the time and understand the game can do it too)
WHAT? I don’t even know how else to say this WHO GETS SEEDED OFF OF STATUS? if you are going to make that claim please name some people in the SF community who have some level of status and no skill to back it up. Or what tournament you went to where someone who never won anything got seeded. Most of SF well known players are well known and seeded for the same reason BECAUSE THEY WIN.
Okay, I was going to come in here and kill it, but Keits beat me to it :tup: As a tournament player and an organizer, I’m fully aware of the random/seeding system and the reason behind them. If you care to look for it, I believe in a cached version of SRK pre '03, you can find the explanation of seeding, double elimination and etc… That is how I learned to run tourneys without people complaining about the matches and the way the brackets were created.
All in all, it will depend on the size of the tournament, the entrants regional background, and existing seeding if there are any. There are now many online tournament systems that will randomly seed players for you. Some have random buttons that will re-random the brackets until you are satisfied with it. This helps with players traveling from out of town. I just ran a very successful tourney here in Central Texas and we had players from Austin, San Antonio, Harker Heights, and etc… Of course the majority of the players were from the home town, but my main concern was to make sure these players didn’t end up playing each other in the first round. Eventually, they’ll end up playing one another depending if they keep winning out and the numbers of players that they traveled with. Also by announcing ahead of time that one area had a large amount of players enter and that some of them ended up playing each other first round will bring the awareness that you did your best to spread them out and you won’t have people sour at you.
As stated above, eventually the top two players will meet in the finals, even if one of them get sent to the losers early by the other top player who sent them there to begin with. If you are familiar with the region top players and how seeding works you won’t have much issues running your tournaments, though you’ll have to also consider the location/area seeding too.
You’ll just have to run a few tournaments to understand and get the hang of it. It’s never going to be perfect, but you make the best with what you got to work with.
As someone who tends to land somewhere between #8 and #13 in local tourneys, let me offer my opinion.
This is just me talking, but I couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about anybody other than the Top 2. Anything other than those two places will NEVER give “accurate” ranking assessment. If the results of a big tourney are something like this . . .
J Wong
Sanford Kelly
Ricky Ortiz
Combofiend
Unknown Player
Alex Valle
Flash M
Ed Ma
. . . will anyone give a damn that some unknown guy placed over Valle, Flash and Edma? Sure, it’ll give the guy some infamy for a while, but individual placement in a tourney can easily mean that you had a good day while someone else had an off day. The “top” players are considered this way NOT because they’ve won or placed well in ONE tournament, but because they CONSISTENTLY place well. If this guy goes to his next random-seeded tournament and gets third, would his placement in this tourney still feel undeserved? If he goes two-and-out…BAM…there’s your proof that he was just a lucky scrub, and there goes his 15 minutes of fame.
I really don’t get the mindset that tournaments are intended to “accurately rank player skill”. Why is this even a practice? There are RanBats and Round Robins for that. In order for you to consider a Top 8 placement in an Elim tournament “accurate”, you’d have to have some preconceived notion over who is better than whom before walking in the door, which isn’t what the tournament is there to reinforce.
One tournament is like one single college exam–yes, the Valedictorian and Salutatorian are probably going to get the top two scores, but that doesn’t justify giving them only half of the questions.